Jeff Weintraub

Monday, April 30, 2007

Infant mortality in Afghanistan

Infant mortality in Afghanistan has fallen dramatically since the demise of the Taleban, [....] with 40,000 fewer babies dying every year.

Improvements in women's access to medical care since the Taleban were ousted from power five years ago was cited as the main reason for the death rate becoming significantly lower. [....]

According to the preliminary results of a Johns Hopkins University study, the infant mortality rate has declined to about 135 per 1,000 live births in 2006, down from an estimated 165 per 1,000 in 2001.

The researchers "found improvements in virtually all aspects of care in almost every province," the public health ministry and World Bank said in a joint statement on the findings. [....]

Benjamin Loevinsohn, a World Bank health specialist, said the survey results probably underestimated the improvement in infant mortality.

"It's a conservative estimate. This is the situation two and a half to three years ago ... It should be better than that now," Mr Loevinsohn said.

He said children were benefiting from a push in 2004 to improve health care and access to vaccinations for diseases such as measles, polio and tetanus.

Encouraging, if true--and I don't know of any reason why this result should seem implausible. If these findings are correct, that would be just one more piece of evidence that, despite all the continuing problems and dangers faced by Afghanistan, the overthrow of the Taliban regime was a great blessing to the Afghan people.

On the other hand, these improved infant-mortality figures indicate that in many respects Afghanistan is still in very bad shape. A mortality rate of 135 dead infants per 1,000 live births is pretty appalling.

To put this infant mortality rate in perspective, we might compare it to rates of 2.3 per thousand for Singapore, 2.76 for Sweden, 2.8 for Japan, 4.8 for the EU as a whole, 6.37 for the US, 19.63 for Mexico, 29.5 for Egypt, 34.61 for India, and 95.5 for Nigeria (figures from the CIA World Factbook). Aside from Afghanistan, the only other countries with (official) infant mortality rates higher than 100 per 1,000 are some of the poorest African countries (though I suspect that the official rates for some other countries, in Africa and elsewhere, are significantly understated).

And consider for a moment what these figures suggest (the boldings are mine):

The study found the number of women receiving prenatal care increased to 30 per cent in 2006 from 5 per cent in 2003.Nineteen per cent of pregnant women were attended by a skilled health worker last year, up from only 5 per cent in 2003.

When a figure of 19% represents a dramatic improvement--which, in this case, it does--that's just a reminder of how awful the situation was before. As Afghanistan's health minister says, "there is a long way to go."

Nevertheless, this is good news. I hope Afghans get more of it. To reiterate some points I made in April 2005:

------------------------------Many people who opposed the 2001 anti-Taliban war continue to claim, in the face of all logic and evidence, that the war - which overthrew one of the most appalling, repressive, and reactionary regimes on the planet, as well as bringing a long-running Afghan civil war to an end - was somehow bad for Afghanistan and the Afghan people. It is time for such people to simply admit that, on this point, they were wrong. All the serious reports on life in Afghanistan since 2001, even the most critical and pessimistic, indicate otherwise. And as Peter Bergen pointed out in a New York Times op-ed piece on September 23, if there were any truth at all to this picture, then it would be difficult to explain why millions of Afghan refugees have returned home since the fall of the Taliban, and continue to do so, rather than fleeing in the opposite direction.

If they want, people who opposed the anti-Taliban war can continue to argue that the war was wrong, unjust, unwise, illegal, and/or imperialist on other grounds. Right or wrong, these arguments raise different issues. But people who make them should honestly face up to the reality that, on balance, the effects of the war were and continue to be beneficial, not harmful, for the great majority of Afghans.

At the same time, it is also true that by any reasonable standard (as distinct from the standard set by the Taliban regime), Afghanistan is still in a terrible mess. It remains devastated and impoverished, with barely rudimentary state institutions and public services. Security is uneven, literacy is low, infant mortality is high, and opium production is booming. As Ahmed Rashid - who knows what he's talking about - indicated in a recent piece for the BBC, it will still require a major effort just to rebuild the 'minimum basic infrastructure that was present in 1979 before the Soviet invasion.'

Ahmed Rashid's piece and twoother recent discussions capture some of the complexities of the situation, from slightly different angles. On the one hand, Afghanistan is far from a lost cause, and overall things have gotten better since 2001. On the other hand, Afghanistan needs and deserves more effective help from the so-called international community - meaning not just the US, which could certainly be doing more, but also Europe, Japan, and others. (And, for that matter, why not Muslim countries as well? Much of the Islamic world rather shamefully opposed the war to overthrow the Taliban. Helping Afghans now would be one way to partly redeem themselves.)------------------------------

Infant mortality in Afghanistan has fallen dramatically since the demise of the Taleban, according to a new study, with 40,000 fewer babies dying every year.

Improvements in women's access to medical care since the Taleban were ousted from power five years ago was cited as the main reason for the death rate becoming significantly lower.

Grim infant and maternal mortality rates have been regularly cited as evidence of Afghanistan's backwardness after decades of war.

They were also seen as a sign of the slow progress of the internationally funded reconstruction effort.

According to the preliminary results of a Johns Hopkins University study, the infant mortality rate has declined to about 135 per 1,000 live births in 2006, down from an estimated 165 per 1,000 in 2001.

The researchers "found improvements in virtually all aspects of care in almost every province," the public health ministry and World Bank said in a joint statement on the findings.

Mohammad Amin Fatimi, Afghanistan's public health minister, said the news was welcomed. "Despite many challenges, there are clear signs of health sector recovery and progress throughout the country," he said.

"But there is a long way to go to provide access to basic health services for Afghans in far remote, under-served and marginalised areas across the country. These infants are the future builders of our country."

Benjamin Loevinsohn, a World Bank health specialist, said the survey results probably underestimated the improvement in infant mortality.

"It's a conservative estimate. This is the situation two and a half to three years ago ... It should be better than that now," Mr Loevinsohn said.

He said children were benefiting from a push in 2004 to improve health care and access to vaccinations for diseases such as measles, polio and tetanus.

The researchers studied more than 600 health facilities annually since 2004.

Doctors and health professionals visited 8,278 households, using a standardised questionnaire to interview one mother per household about her birth history.

The study found the number of women receiving prenatal care increased to 30 per cent in 2006 from 5 per cent in 2003.

Nineteen per cent of pregnant women were attended by a skilled health worker last year, up from only 5 per cent in 2003.

The survey was conducted in 29 of the country's 34 provinces - excluding Helmand, Uruzgan, Kandahar, Zabul and Nuristan because of security concerns, Mr Loevinsohn said.

The ministry is working to set up small clinics, deploy mobile teams in remote rural areas, expand community midwifery training, and increase the number of female staff at health facilities.

However Afghanistan still has one of the world's highest maternal mortality rates.

"No woman should die giving life," she said during a visit to Afghanistan this week.

"No nation can be developed when its women are dying giving birth."

• Taleban militants have seized control of a district in south-east Afghanistan after a clash that killed five people, including the local mayor and his police chief, it was reported yesterday.

The Taleban launched the attack on Thursday evening on the Giro district of Ghazni province, setting fire to several buildings and cutting communication lines, according to the provincial deputy governor, Kazim Allayer.

Tragedy & complexity in Iraq (Tish Durkin)

Discussions of the 2003 Iraq war and its aftermath, by both supporters and opponents, are too often dominated by one-sided simplifications and exaggerated claims of moral and political certainty. (Not to mention substantial amounts of selective perception, distortion, inaccuracy, fallacious reasoning, prevarication, and outright dishonesty. Of course, each side pretends that only its opponents ever commit these offenses.)

None of this can be said about the thoughtful and moving piece below by Tish Durkin, a journalist who covered Iraq from 2003-2004. Durkin's reflections are valuable and impressive for several reasons, but an important one is that she tries to cut through the standard polemical talking-points to confront the genuine complexity, ambiguity, and tragedy inherent in this subject. Her emphasis throughout is on ambivalence--both her own inescapable ambivalence as an outside observer and, even more fundamentally, the deep ambivalence of many Iraqis who have had to live through this experience.

Showdowns are all about certainty, and for me, Iraq has always been a place of ambivalence.[....]

Whatever you think of the rest of this post, please do not write in to impress upon me the horrors that have descended upon innocent Iraqis since the American-led invasion. I really feel that I know.

I know other things too, though. Maybe it's just the contrarian in me, but it is these other things that I feel the need to stress, especially to those who are now reveling in their rightness about the war. Those who opposed the war seem to feel that they are the perfect opposite of those who sold the war - and of course, in the important sense of the invade-or-not-to-invade question, they are. But in their collective allergy to any fact that may complicate their position; their proud blindness to the color gray, and their fervent faith in their own infallibility, the two sides have always struck me as very much the same. [....}

That's what drives me crazy about the whole American discussion of Iraq now: it's treated as being so damned simple, when, if you care about the Iraqis at all, it's anything but.

Durkin was brave enough to offer her reflections to readers of the Huffington Post, whom she could expect to be almost monolithically opposed to the 2003 Iraq war and to further US engagement in Iraq. So she focuses here on telling this audience things that they wouldn't want to hear and challenging their false certainties and unexamined assumptions. On the other hand, she adds:

Don't get me wrong. If I felt that this post were going to be read by a bunch of war apologists, I would take them angrily to task for the manifest, manifold failures in Iraq, and the criminally self-indulgent fictions on which those failures were based. But since this post is presumably being read mostly by war critics, I will devote it to challenging anti-war activists on their apparent belief that everything they say about Iraq is, always has been, and ever shall be true.

However you feel or have felt about the 2003 Iraq war and about the dilemmas currently posed by Iraq, this is a valuable piece that you ought to read and ponder. Some highlights:

It is not, for instance, true that it was the American-led invasion that opened season on the slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians. Whatever else the Bush administration made up about Iraq, the rank murderousness of Saddam Hussein was not one of them. Amid the gunfire and giddiness of Baghdad right after its fall in April 2003, it was common to find people converging onto bits of infrastructure, manically fueled by the rumor mill: someone had said that there was a torture chamber underneath this stretch of highway; a secret prison built into this wall. People had no time to be interviewed; if they talked at all, they'd keep going as they panted: "My husband/brother/son disappeared twenty odd years ago; he could still be alive; I have to get him out." I remember going to a mass grave; a "minor" one, not far from Hilla. People were digging there, too: for bones, which were piled everywhere, a sickening canine bonanza. Close by there still lived a man who had seen what had happened there in the days after the war with Kuwait, but kept his mouth shut for years: busloads of innocent Shi'ites, screaming 'God is Great' at the top of their lungs, had been unloaded, rung around pre-dug graves, and shot.

Of course, it makes sense for Americans to feel more interested - and implicated -- in suffering that is inflicted in the context of an American occupation. [....[But we should also consider] the possibility that the post-invasion suffering in Iraq, which we see and hear about constantly - as, of course, we should -- may seem disproportionately greater to us than the pre-invasion suffering, which we almost never saw or heard about at all.

It is not true that the Americans invaded Iraq against the will of the Iraqi people. They did so against the will of Saddam, against the will of those who flourished under Saddam, and against the will of numerous Sunn'is and Christians, most of them utterly blameless for the crimes of the regime, who feared what would happen to them after the Shi'ites got out from under Saddam. This last is not an inconsiderable group - except as compared to the Shi'ites and the Kurds [JW: who add up to about 80% of Iraqis], who overwhelmingly wanted the invasion and welcomed it. [....]

In the late spring of 2003, like hundreds of reporters, I joined the multitudes flocking to Karbala for ashura, the Shi'ite pilgrimage which had been forbidden under Saddam. Concerns about violence were high, but unfounded: As it turned out, in every possible sense, it was the brightest possible day. [....] Throughout the day, I could feel myself being sized up by people, and this, I'll admit, made me a little nervous. No need: when they were sure of the foreignness of my face, people did not insult or attack me. They smiled and said: "Thank you Bush, thank you Blair." [....]

All this, of course, was very early days, before disillusionment set in, then anger, then rage. But that evolution was not swift, nor, I firmly believe, was it inevitable. In many areas of Iraq, generally, palpably pro-American feeling was not imaginary, it was not rare, and -- apart from the total-infatuation, flower-tossing phase which did fade quickly -- it was not all that short-lived. In fact, I'd say - with considerable anger and frustration of my own - that the U.S. had at least one year in which the overwhelming majority of Iraqis were only too willing to believe that much as they disliked and then despised the fact of foreign occupation, that occupation was going to lead them somewhere they wanted to go. This shocked me. [....]

On Iraqis' ambivalence, about which Durkin is acute:

Take the night that Saddam Hussein was captured, when I went around to various parts of Baghdad and asked people what they thought. In one breath, they'd fantasize in gory detail how they'd kill him if they could: how, for instance, they wanted to personally chop him up in little pieces and then feed him to wild dogs, ideally with his heart still beating. In the next breath, they would lament that they felt sorry for him as he had his post-capture medical examination videotaped; he was, after all, their leader.

Asked, many times over many days, what, if anything, could be done to salvage the deteriorating situation, they'd insist: things would never improve unless the Americans supplied jobs, fought crime, restored the schools, guarded the banks, built homes and sewage systems, even mediated family quarrels....and also left Iraq immediately.

My point is not that Iraqis are somehow hopelessly loopy or illogical. It's that, having careened from one kind of national trauma to another kind of national trauma, they have some strongly felt but deeply conflicting feelings about things. For most Iraqis, the whole question of the invasion was extremely complicated, and, even now - without remotely minimizing the disasters that have increased in the intervening years -- I imagine that it still is.

Why we need to hold on to complexity and intelligent ambivalence ourselves, and avoid the traps of easy simplification--in thinking about Iraq now, and in drawing lessons for the future:

It's easy to rewrite a very complex story as a dark fairy tale that begins and ends with the evil of Bush and Cheney. This, presumably, is why so many people are doing it. But it's still wrong.

If none of this was ever hard - if the consensus is simply that this whole invasion was always a stupid idea and there was never, ever any reason why any good or intelligent person would have considered it - then [in the future we can just ignore a lot of complicating questions that are sure to return -JW]. We won't have to think about what, if anything, a dictator can do to compromise his sovereignty in the eyes of the world [....] about what, if anything, should be done to enforce peace agreements that have been shredded, or international sanctions that have been ignored [....] about where, if anywhere, we draw the line between allowing international bodies, such as the U.N., to prevent war, and allowing them to perpetuate, if only indirectly, very serious violence of other kinds.

And last but not least:

Finally, what depresses me, and makes me despise so much war criticism even when I agree with it, is that so many of those positing it seem so happy about what's gone wrong. They seem to relish the probability that Iraq will get worse and worse so that they can be righter and righter.

This isn't new.

I remember an anti-war activist who was staying in our hotel in Baghdad, who had not come to Karbala for that first ashura. A good person trying to do good things, she had stayed behind to prepare a media alert on the horrors of the occupation -- which, especially at a time when the coverage out of Iraq was largely very upbeat, was a very worthy thing to be doing. Still, one thing really bothered me about her. When, upon everyone's return from Karbala, the activist heard that the day had actually been free of violence, and full of jubilation, she looked as if she had tasted a bad olive, and spit out her response: "Oh, fuck."

How she must be gloating now. Reality has made sages of the most dire prophets. It's perfect: Iraq really has gone to hell, and the demon neocons are the ones that sent it.

Like liberals - and thinking conservatives, and sentient beings -- everywhere, I gravely doubt that the troop surge - so little so late -- will do anything to save Iraq. But for the sake of the Iraqi people, I sure hope it does - even if that helps the Republicans.

Right.

--Jeff Weintraub

P.S. This excellent piece has already been noted and discussed by a number of other people, including Norman Geras,Andrew Sullivan, and Gene at Harry's Place, who described it as "the best piece I've read about the Iraq tragedy in many months--perhaps years. [....] It's aimed--critically--at the largely antiwar readership of the Huffington Post, but it doesn't let war supporters off the hook either. And it's heartbreaking.." Yes, it is.

I know I should be passionately following the showdown between Congress and the president over legislation tying the funding of American troops in Iraq to a timetable for the troops' withdrawal from Iraq. Honestly, though, I find it hard to follow it at all. Showdowns are all about certainty, and for me, Iraq has always been a place of ambivalence.

I lived in Baghdad from April 2003 through September 2004, when I left without, of course, really leaving. Even if it weren't for the endless reels of bad news, I would have reels of memory on constant re-play in my mind.

I remember Riyadh, a bright and supremely idealistic young Shi'ite who had signed on as a translator for the U.S. Army but who, on his days off, used to take me around -- in ordinary, randomly hailed share-ride vans and taxis, if you can imagine it now - to markets and mosques and people's houses, just to scrounge around for stories...until, one morning on his way to work, Riyadh was shot to death.

I remember Mohaymen, a 26-year-old Iraqi who, with my then-fiancé, co-founded JumpStart, a humanitarian organization that directly employed thousands of Iraqis in the rebuilding effort. Every morning at an ungodly hour, he would show up to pick up Sean, and the two of them would drive around in Mohaymen's white Hyundai Galloper to building sites all over the place....until one day in July 2004, when Sean and I were briefly back in the States, some gunmen pulled even with the Galloper on a busy highway in broad daylight and shot Mohaymen to death.

I remember having lunch someplace when a car bomb went off -- not, as it sounded, right under the table, but close enough so that when we - the not-yet-dead Mohaymen and I -- stepped out onto the street, it was black with smoke and littered with human remains. And I remember later interviewing the family - or was it just the son? -- of someone who had literally been scattered by that bombing. I don't recall the details of how the family had retrieved the body, but they had definitely had to go around, collecting him.

Whatever you think of the rest of this post, please do not write in to impress upon me the horrors that have descended upon innocent Iraqis since the American-led invasion. I really feel that I know.

I know other things too, though. Maybe it's just the contrarian in me, but it is these other things that I feel the need to stress, especially to those who are now reveling in their rightness about the war. Those who opposed the war seem to feel that they are the perfect opposite of those who sold the war - and of course, in the important sense of the invade-or-not-to-invade question, they are. But in their collective allergy to any fact that may complicate their position; their proud blindness to the color gray, and their fervent faith in their own infallibility, the two sides have always struck me as very much the same.

Don't get me wrong. If I felt that this post were going to be read by a bunch of war apologists, I would take them angrily to task for the manifest, manifold failures in Iraq, and the criminally self-indulgent fictions on which those failures were based. But since this post is presumably being read mostly by war critics, I will devote it to challenging anti-war activists on their apparent belief that everything they say about Iraq is, always has been, and ever shall be true.

It is not, for instance, true that it was the American-led invasion that opened season on the slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians. Whatever else the Bush administration made up about Iraq, the rank murderousness of Saddam Hussein was not one of them. Amid the gunfire and giddiness of Baghdad right after its fall in April 2003, it was common to find people converging onto bits of infrastructure, manically fueled by the rumor mill: someone had said that there was a torture chamber underneath this stretch of highway; a secret prison built into this wall. People had no time to be interviewed; if they talked at all, they'd keep going as they panted: "My husband/brother/son disappeared twenty odd years ago; he could still be alive; I have to get him out." I remember going to a mass grave; a "minor" one, not far from Hilla. People were digging there, too: for bones, which were piled everywhere, a sickening canine bonanza. Close by there still lived a man who had seen what had happened there in the days after the war with Kuwait, but kept his mouth shut for years: busloads of innocent Shi'ites, screaming 'God is Great' at the top of their lungs, had been unloaded, rung around pre-dug graves, and shot.

Of course, it makes sense for Americans to feel more interested - and implicated -- in suffering that is inflicted in the context of an American occupation. And there is no question that - and it kills me that it has come to this -- fewer and fewer Iraqis see life after Saddam as any better than life under Saddam. Still, one needn't be a hawk, nor a rocket scientist, to give half a moment's thought to the possibility that the post-invasion suffering in Iraq, which we see and hear about constantly - as, of course, we should -- may seem disproportionately greater to us than the pre-invasion suffering, which we almost never saw or heard about at all.

It is not true that the Americans invaded Iraq against the will of the Iraqi people. They did so against the will of Saddam, against the will of those who flourished under Saddam, and against the will of numerous Sunn'is and Christians, most of them utterly blameless for the crimes of the regime, who feared what would happen to them after the Shi'ites got out from under Saddam. This last is not an inconsiderable group - except as compared to the Shi'ites and the Kurds, who overwhelmingly wanted the invasion and welcomed it.

I know that these anecdotes will sound as if Karen Hughes or somebody paid me to cook them up, but they all really happened: The day I met Riyadh, he told me what he had been doing before the war. He and his family would sit around and listen to underground BBC radio. And if the French or somebody else in the U.N. seemed to come up with something that would offer the world a glimmer of hope that war could be avoided, their reaction was not, "thank God." It was: "Oh shit."

I remember that in May - after about thirty days without a shower - I went to a beauty salon that had just re-opened. This was in Aadamiyah, which is quite a Sunn'i district. Out of gratitude for the invasion, the owner would not let me pay.

In the late spring of 2003, like hundreds of reporters, I joined the multitudes flocking to Karbala for ashura, the Shi'ite pilgrimage which had been forbidden under Saddam. Concerns about violence were high, but unfounded: As it turned out, in every possible sense, it was the brightest possible day. Flags were flying. Great ropey lines of men were stepping rhythmically and ritually beating their bare backs. Granted, the whole scene could have been a coming attraction for theocracy, but for the moment, it looked and felt like an entire country's drawing of a deep breath after years of suffocation. Like every woman there, I was swathed in black from head to toe. Throughout the day, I could feel myself being sized up by people, and this, I'll admit, made me a little nervous. No need: when they were sure of the foreignness of my face, people did not insult or attack me. They smiled and said: "Thank you Bush, thank you Blair."

None of this was really surprising. In the months prior to the war, I had spent almost all my time in neighboring, not-so-democratic countries. Among average people, the biggest sentiment expressed about the ever-more-likely prospect of American action in Iraq wasn't "how dare you come to our region and topple a sovereign government!" It was, "jeez - why don't you come here too?" Once in Iraq, when I would get e-mails from concerned friends and family as to whether people hated me because I was an American, I'd laugh. It wasn't the idea of Americans being disliked that cracked me up; it was the idea of Americans being alone on the list, or even in the top ten. Let's see: Iraqis hated the French and the Russians for doing so much business with Saddam. They hated other Arab governments for leaving them to be brutalized by him. They hated the Palestinians for having sided with Saddam in the war of '91, and they hated the Syrians for sending in - or at least allowing the sending-in of --- jihadists to make trouble now. As for anti-American sentiment, that which was most commonly expressed was not against George W. Bush for having taken Saddam out. It was that expressed against George H.W. Bush for not having done so when, as they viewed it, he had had the chance.

All this, of course, was very early days, before disillusionment set in, then anger, then rage. But that evolution was not swift, nor, I firmly believe, was it inevitable. In many areas of Iraq, generally, palpably pro-American feeling was not imaginary, it was not rare, and -- apart from the total-infatuation, flower-tossing phase which did fade quickly -- it was not all that short-lived. In fact, I'd say - with considerable anger and frustration of my own - that the U.S. had at least one year in which the overwhelming majority of Iraqis were only too willing to believe that much as they disliked and then despised the fact of foreign occupation, that occupation was going to lead them somewhere they wanted to go. This shocked me. About eight or nine months into it, the bloom was well and truly off the American rose: the initial post-Saddam chaos, far from being calmed, had simply become the rule. Crimes -- political, semi-political, and just plain old crooked - were committed with impunity. Kidnapping rings, like internet cafes and car dealerships, had begun springing up everywhere. And of course, the promise of jobs and housing and restored electricity and all the rest of it never came close to being kept. It is true that even the most brilliant, best organized administration would have been hard pressed to bridge the gap between the expectations of Iraqis and the limits of reality - but also true that the U.S. established a tyranny of ineptitude that baffles me to this day. In short, by that time, I would absolutely have bet that as far as the Iraqis were concerned, anything, including Saddam, was better than this. But I had that wrong.

For several weeks, before the first anniversary of the invasion, I made it a habit to end any interview with any Iraqi -- whether the topic was -de-Ba'athification or arranged marriage or the (extreme) availability of all kinds of weaponry on the black market - whether, knowing every negative thing - of which there were many -- that they knew now about the Americans, they would turn back the clock, have the coalition stay home, and put Saddam back in the palace. But I should mention that during this time I was not in Fallujah or Ramadi or any of the so-called Sunn'i triangle, where my "poll" would have had very different results. Still, I was and am amazed that not a single person hesitated to say 'no way.'

Now, I am sure that if I went back today and asked the same people the same question, many would answer differently. But now as then, I'd bet anything that many would also answer confusingly.

Take the night that Saddam Hussein was captured, when I went around to various parts of Baghdad and asked people what they thought. In one breath, they'd fantasize in gory detail how they'd kill him if they could: how, for instance, they wanted to personally chop him up in little pieces and then feed him to wild dogs, ideally with his heart still beating. In the next breath, they would lament that they felt sorry for him as he had his post-capture medical examination videotaped; he was, after all, their leader.

Asked, many times over many days, what, if anything, could be done to salvage the deteriorating situation, they'd insist: things would never improve unless the Americans supplied jobs, fought crime, restored the schools, guarded the banks, built homes and sewage systems, even mediated family quarrels....and also left Iraq immediately.

My point is not that Iraqis are somehow hopelessly loopy or illogical. It's that, having careened from one kind of national trauma to another kind of national trauma, they have some strongly felt but deeply conflicting feelings about things. For most Iraqis, the whole question of the invasion was extremely complicated, and, even now - without remotely minimizing the disasters that have increased in the intervening years -- I imagine that it still is.

That's what drives me crazy about the whole American discussion of Iraq now: it's treated as being so damned simple, when, if you care about the Iraqis at all, it's anything but.

If you are still reading at this point, I could forgive you for saying:

"OK, OK, enough with memory lane. Even if everything you are saying was true as of a couple of years ago, why rehash what went wrong when? It's all gotten worse and worse. Let's just get the hell out of there and be done with it."

In terms of the what-now in Iraq, that might be the only option we've got. But in terms of the what-next for the United States, it's not enough.

It's easy to rewrite a very complex story as a dark fairy tale that begins and ends with the evil of Bush and Cheney. This, presumably, is why so many people are doing it. But it's still wrong.

If none of this was ever hard - if the consensus is simply that this whole invasion was always a stupid idea and there was never, ever any reason why any good or intelligent person would have considered it - then all we have to do is elect someone nice and smart, and ignore whatever legitimate factors there may have been to mitigate our certitude. We won't have to think about what, if anything, a dictator can do to compromise his sovereignty in the eyes of the world. We won't have to think about what, if anything, should be done to enforce peace agreements that have been shredded, or international sanctions that have been ignored. We don't have to worry about where, if anywhere, we draw the line between allowing international bodies, such as the U.N., to prevent war, and allowing them to perpetuate, if only indirectly, very serious violence of other kinds.

Finally, what depresses me, and makes me despise so much war criticism even when I agree with it, is that so many of those positing it seem so happy about what's gone wrong. They seem to relish the probability that Iraq will get worse and worse so that they can be righter and righter.

This isn't new.

I remember an anti-war activist who was staying in our hotel in Baghdad, who had not come to Karbala for that first ashura. A good person trying to do good things, she had stayed behind to prepare a media alert on the horrors of the occupation -- which, especially at a time when the coverage out of Iraq was largely very upbeat, was a very worthy thing to be doing. Still, one thing really bothered me about her. When, upon everyone's return from Karbala, the activist heard that the day had actually been free of violence, and full of jubilation, she looked as if she had tasted a bad olive, and spit out her response: "Oh, fuck."

How she must be gloating now. Reality has made sages of the most dire prophets. It's perfect: Iraq really has gone to hell, and the demon neocons are the ones that sent it.

Like liberals - and thinking conservatives, and sentient beings -- everywhere, I gravely doubt that the troop surge - so little so late -- will do anything to save Iraq. But for the sake of the Iraqi people, I sure hope it does - even if that helps the Republicans.

Tragedy & complexity in Iraq - The case of Riverbend

One of the after-effects of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein & his regime in 2003 was the emergence of a lively Iraqi blogosphere, including some English-speaking bloggers who have developed world-wide audiences. For westerners opposed to the Iraq war and the US presence in Iraq, the favorite English-language Iraqi blogger has probably been "Riverbend," a secular Sunni Arab woman who blogs from Baghdad (Baghdad Burning).

One reason, though not the only one, is that Riverbend has provided these readers with a story-line they find immediately sympathetic and unproblematic. Most of the English-language Iraqi bloggers, like most Iraqis, welcomed the overthrow of the Ba'ath regime in 2003. They may have been more or less ambivalent about how it was accomplished, but they regarded it as a necessary and enormously positive step for Iraq. (Some have been terribly disillusioned since then. For example, in October 2006 Zeyad of "Healing Iraq" said: "I now officially regret supporting this war back in 2003. The guilt is too much for me to handle." Others, like the brothers who write "Iraq the Model" or "Alaa" at "The Mesopotamian", continue to defend the overthrow of the Ba'ath regime and remain hopeful about the possibilities for building up a more decent Iraq.) Riverbend, on the other hand, has consistently said the kinds of things that opponents of the war wanted to hear, and she has consistently ignored, dismissed, or expressed contempt for any other Iraqis who felt differently.

I agree that Riverbend's commentary is often intelligent and illuminating, if one takes it with an appropriate grain of salt. But, like all of us, she speaks from a particular point of view with its own agendas, and readers need to keep that in mind. Her fans too often tend to treat her as expressing the Iraqi perspective on the 2003 Iraq war and its aftermath, but in fact the perspective she represents is one among many in Iraq--and often it is so one-sided that it's skewed and misleading.

=> A few days ago Andrew Sullivan, whose own position on the Iraq war has moved over the past 5 years from strong support to conflicted opposition, linked to a post in which Riverbend broke the sad news that she and her family have finally decided to leave Iraq because Baghdad has become too unsafe.

This announcement followed a discussion that, as usual, blamed sectarian violence in Baghdad entirely on the Shiite parties in the Iraqi government (which Riverbend customarily refers to as the "Iraqi puppet government") and other members of "the Iraqi pro-war crowd," and that contrasted the present situation with an idyllic picture of inter-sectarian harmony in Iraq before 2003. Sullivan quoted a few of Riverbend's paragraphs that included the following passages:

I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq's history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. [....]

I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn't know what our neighbors were- we didn't care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now.

There are obviously some grains of truth here. But the overall picture being presented is so patently selective, tendentious, misleading, and ideologically distorted that I felt moved to send Andrew Sullivan a message suggesting some caveats and reality checks. See below.

--Jeff Weintraub

====================Hi Andrew,

Regarding your latest post about Riverbend ... conscience compels me to add some caveats, qualifications, and context to her remarks and yours.

I don't want to deny or trivialize the genuinely appalling situation that Riverbend is talking about, and she has always contributed one significant perspective to the Iraqi (English-language) discussion about the 2003 war and its aftermath. Like all of Riverbend's commentaries, this one should command some attention and respect just because she's been there, she's bright, and some of the things she says makes sense.

On the other hand, what Riverbend says always has to be taken with a grain of salt, too, since she invariably represents a totally one-sided perspective--that of the formerly dominant Sunni Arab minority--in a society polarized by ethnic & sectarian conflicts and, increasingly, by sectarian murders and other atrocities in the Arab part of Iraq. Riverbend simply cannot comprehend why any other Iraqis, including great majorities of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds (who add up to some 80% of the Iraqi population), might see the situation differently from the way she does, and might find it harder to think of pre-2003 Iraq as the good old days. So she either pretends their perspectives don't exist or dismisses them as special interests, US dupes, Iranian agents, and so on.

In Riverbend's case, perhaps, we can excuse all this. As I said, she's had to live with the situation, and we haven't. But it also has to be kept in mind that she presents a special, one-sided, and in some ways quite misleading perspective--that of the Sunni Arab minority, and especially its urban professional classes.

This comes through in everything she says, including the post from which you quoted. Riverbend remembers that, before 2003, it didn't matter whether you were Sunni or Shiite in Arab Iraq. But one reason she remembers it that way is that she was a member of a privileged minority. (Similarly, many whites in the US south sincerely believed that race relations were basically OK until things got stirred up by "outside agitators".) It's very clear that very, very large numbers of Iraqi Shiites saw things very differently. (Let's just ignore the way Kurds might have seen the situation--since Riverbend generally ignores that, too.)

There's no question that there has been a great deal of sectarian polarization since 2003 (though, to my knowledge, Riverbend has never acknowledged that some of it might have been promoted by the ongoing mass murder of Shiite civilians by the so-called Sunni Arab "insurgency"), but many Iraqi Shiites believe that before 2003 it actually mattered a lot whether you were Sunni or Shiite. (Riverbend never seems to mention such topics as historic patterns of ethnic & sectarian discrimination, mass graves, and the like, either.)

And her latest post demonstrates, once again, that Riverbend simply can't imagine that other Iraqis who don't come from the Formerly Dominant Minority (to repeat, non-FDM Iraqis add up to at least 80% of the population) might see the situation differently from the way she sees it, and why they find it hard to see the period of Saddam Hussein's rule as the good old days.

If Riverbend wants to argue that the 2003 Iraq war and its aftermath have been a disaster for Iraqis, that's certainly a respectable position. But this is different from her repeated claims that when that when Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled (along with his statues), only some "imported American-trained monkeys" applauded. (I wonder how Iraqi Shiites like being called "monkeys"?) We know that's not true. In 2005, during the national elections, Riverbend reported that no one in Iraq took them seriously--at least, no one she knew. They were just an American charade. ("Most people I've talked to aren't going to go to elections. It's simply too dangerous and there's a sense that nothing is going to be achieved anyway.") In fact, we know that millions of Iraqis risked their lives to vote--even Robert Fisk could not help being moved by the spectacle. And so on.

Like too many others among Iraq's Sunni Arabs, Riverbend can't shake loose from the notion that her perspective is that of "Iraqis" in general. The perspectives of non-Sunni-Arab Iraqis are simply ignored or dismissed. But this produces a rather misleading overall picture, to say the least.

The reality is both more complex and more tragic. We know that most Iraqis are (justifiably) exasperated or even enraged by the many failures of the Americans in the post-Saddam occupation and non-reconstruction of the country. However, whenever public opinion polls have asked Iraqis directly whether, despite all the chaos and suffering since 2003, it was worth it to get rid of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath regime ... solid majorities of both Shiites and Kurds have consistently said yes.

Maybe they're wrong, but that's what they say, and (unlike Riverbend) we shouldn't simply pretend otherwise. The implications are actually pretty sobering. Given how bad things look now, try to imagine how bad most Iraqis (not Riverbend, but most Iraqis) must have thought things looked then.

And if one wants to understand why it has been hard for Iraqi political factions to work out a reasonable solution, then the kind of Sunni Arab mind-set that Riverbend represents--also represented by most of the Sunni Arab political and religious leadership, unfortunately--is certainly part of the story. It reinforces the feeling among many Iraqi Shiites that members of the Formerly Dominant Minority continue to view them with contempt, utterly fail to recognize their concerns and grievances, and would still like to take back Iraq to the good old days of unquestioned Sunni Arab dominance.

Contrary to Riverbend's repeated assertions and contemptuous dismissals, all the available evidence indicates that most Iraqis genuinely hoped that the 2003 war and the overthrow of the Ba'ath regime would mean a better life for themselves and for Iraq as a whole. (Actually, in comprehensive polls substantial proportions of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds still say that their lives have gotten better individually--this study is just one example--though they think the situation looks bad for Iraq overall.) The fact that this hasn't happened is a tragedy--a tragedy for which a lot of responsibility goes both to the spectacular incompetence and almost criminal irresponsibility of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld gang and the savagery & irredentism of the so-called Sunni Arab "insurgency." But the whole meaning of that tragedy is totally distorted if we simply swallow the premise of people like Riverbend that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was basically OK for most Iraqis, and that most Iraqis look back to the period of Ba'athist rule as the good old days. It's just not true.

Yours for reality-based discourse,Jeff Weintraub

[P.S. For one roundup of some Iraqi bloggers' reactions to Riverbend's latest communication, see this post on Iraqi Bloggers Central ... a website that also has a useful and fairly comprehensive collection of links to English-language blogs by Iraqis, as well as non-Iraqi blogs that deal with Iraq.]

If we focus just on Iraqis killed in politically related violence (leaving aside estimates for disease, ordinary crime, and other categories), the great majority of the victims have been Iraqi civilians murdered either by the Sunni Arab "insurgents" or, more recently, by a growing wave of reprisal killings by Shiite Arab death squads. [....]

The atrocities by both sides in this sectarian civil war need to be equally condemned. But we should also not forget that the prime mover in this story has been the savage and unrelenting campaign of terrorist mass murder against Iraqi Shiites carried out since early 2004 by the coalition of Ba'athists and Islamist fanatics at the core of the Sunni Arab "insurgency." [....] A central thrust of the Sunni Arab "insurgency" has been a systematic strategy of murdering Iraqi Shiites - ranging from major religious and political figures through government employees and professionals to indiscriminately targeted ordinary people - in order to detonate a full-scale sectarian civil war that would render the country ungovernable and panic the US into leaving Iraq, after which they expect (rightly or wrongly) that they can crush the Shiites and restore the dominance of the Sunni Arab minority. [....]

The morning began with a guerrilla bombing of a police checkpoint at the gate to the Shiite slum of Sadr City, which killed 41.

Then the terrorists opened the gates of hell, carefully placing high explosives in a Shiite market and detonating them as workers gathered to take minibuses home after a hard day's work. The blast incinerated or tore apart some 140 persons and injured 150 more, according to Reuters.

Al-Hayat says: "Eyewitnesses said that furious citizens, who busied themselves with collecting bodies charred by the horrific explosion and gathering body parts spread over an area of fifty years, threw stones and the rubble produced by the explosion at a joint American/ Iraqi force that came to the market, forcing it to withdraw before this demonstration of popular rage."

Peddlers in the market put their wooden trolleys to work as ambulances for the wounded.

There were reports of children being pulled alive from beneath the charred corpses of their relatives.

Later on, the guerrillas set off two smaller bombs, killing even more Iraqis. [....]

A big nitric acid cache was also found in Baghdad, probably intended for use in bomb making by the guerrillas.--------------------

I would only add that the appropriate term for people whose main strategy is the indiscriminate mass murder of civilians is not "guerrillas". Cole knows this, I'm sure. At one point he breaks with this blandly euphemistic terminology and says, more accurately, that "the terrorists opened the gates of hell".

There's more:

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that the Baghdad coroner's office is reporting a significant uptick in the number of unidentified corpses coming into the Baghdad morgue, especially from the (Sunni) Karkh area. This trend is a reversal of the lower numbers of corpses being found daily in February and March.

Judging from the McClatchy roundup, most of these seem to have been killed by terrorists from the Sunni Arab "insurgency," but some look like victims of Shiite death squads. Killings by Shiite death squads in Baghdad have gone down significantly during Petraeus's security operation, since the Sadrists and other Shiite militias have been lying low. But the continuing murders of Shiite civilians may be prompting some resumption in reprisal killings.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

The French vote for President ... & Ségolène Royal praises Tony Blair

The first round of the French Presidential election is happening today. Early reports indicate heavy voter turnout. This is an extremely important election, and the ultimate result is genuinely unpredictable.

Among the major candidates, curiously enough, the one who identifies himself most strongly as an opponent of the status quo and an advocate of sweeping reforms is the candidate of the ruling center-right coalition, Nicolas Sarkozy. (Of course, not everyone would agree that the kinds of changes he proposes constitute "reforms.") Sarkozy and Chirac, who allegedly represent the same neo-Gaullist party, openly loathe each other. But all the major candidates claim to stand, in one way or another, for 'change'. The Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, won her party's nomination against the strong and almost unanimous opposition of the rest of the party leadership. Royal won the hearts of the Socialist party rank-and-file (a US-style primary of party members gave her the nomination), but she doesn't seem to have been as successful in winning over the general electorate.

Opinion polls differ in the details, but so far all of them give Sarkozy a slight lead over Royal. An independent self-described "centrist" candidate from another center-right party, François Bayrou, has been nipping at their heels for months. Bayrou has been running as an outsider more than anything else, and the strength of his candidacy seems to be in large part a sign of widespread dissatisfaction with the established French political class. Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of the far-right xenophobic & racist National Front, stunned everyone--and appalled many--in 2002 by forcing out the Socialist candidate and winning a place in the second round of the election, in which he was then crushed by Chirac. (Anti-Le Pen demonstrators marched under the immortal slogan: "Vote for the crook, not the fascist!" Chirac has been dogged by long-running corruption scandals, but has been protected from legal jeopardy by Presidential immunity.) This time around, it doesn't look as though Le Pen will make it into the top two. But polling figures have always understated his support, so he might surprise everyone again. Then, of course, there are the usual swarms of minor candidates, who may siphon off enough votes from one or another of the main candidates to influence the first-round result.

The polls also indicate high proportions of respondents saying they were still undecided. We'll have to see what happens. Meanwhile, a few offhand thoughts.

=> In the election-eve overview below, London Times correspondent Charles Bremner highlights one interesting tidbit from a radio interview by the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal. In the French political and intellectual world, there is an overwhelming consensus that anyone who considers himself or herself to be left-wing or progressive--or, for that matter, a standard Gaullist--is supposed to dislike and vilify Tony Blair and "blairisme" as a matter of course. Beyond the question of the 2003 Iraq war, Blair is held to represent the dreaded "Anglo-Saxon" model that is seen as a mortal threat to French civilization. A few months back Royal said something favorable about Blair and took a lot of heat for it, so she has mostly been trying to avoid the subject. However, in a major radio interview just before the election, she addressed the subject head-on and openly praised Blair. In a French context, this was startling.

Royal roused her followers in Toulouse, but more interesting to report was her unexpected tribute to Tony Blair on France-Inter radio this morning. [....] When France-Inter taunted her over Blair this morning, I expected her to perform her usual evasion, instead, she bravely said the following:

"There was a taboo. The Socialists were not supposed to mention Tony Blair. My concern is to look at what works and see how we can apply solutions to France. Tony Blair invested massively in public services, in health care, schools and the battle against youth unemployment. He succeeded in meeting the challenge."

Let's leave aside the substantive question of whether or not Blair deserves this tribute. (I think he mostly does.) The fact that Royal said it, and said it in such a conspicuous and straightforward way, is intriguing in itself. Was this an incident that fits Michael Kinsley's definition of what a "gaffe" means in American politics--that is, when a politician accidentally or unintentionally tells the truth in public. Was it a case of sincerity trumping calculations of political expediency? Or was it, contrary to first appearances, the product of political calculations--that is, did Royal and her advisers decide that, contrary to conventional wisdom, "bravely" saying something favorable about Blair would help rather than hurt her with significant portions of the French electorate. Any of these three alternatives would tell us something interesting.

(The foreign political figure with whom Royal has most strongly identified herself is the Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist elected in 2006 as the first woman President of Chile. Incidentally, both Bachelet and her predecessor Ricardo Lagos, who is also from the Socialist Party, could be described as Blairist in some important respects.)

=> Sarkozy and his wife have apparently been having marital difficulties, and his wife has been conspicuously absent from the campaign.

Libération today ran a column pointing up the pusillanimity of the French media. In a US campaign, if the candidate's wife went AWOL, he would face immediate questions, but in France there is silence, said Daniel Schneiderman, Libération's media columnist.

If French journalists have avoided gossiping and obsessing about Sarkozy's family life and focused on other matters, why on earth should that be described as "pusillanimity"? On the contrary, this strikes me as a sign that, at least in this one respect, France is a more politically mature and sensible country than we are.

=> I notice from Friday's New York Times article about the French election that Le Pen has accused Sarkozy, whose father and maternal grandfather were immigrants (the latter a Greek Jew who converted to Catholicism, no less), of not really being French.

“Mr. Sarkozy, the world does not revolve around your little person,” Mr. Le Pen said at a rally on Sunday. “Long before your parents came from Hungary or Greece, there was at the heart of the French people a national current that cared more about the interests of the country than about its ruling class.”

Sarkozy, for his part, has unabashedly evoked his immigrant roots.

=> One last point. My impression is that all three of the leading candidates oppose Turkey's admission into the European Union, though some might describe Royal's position on this issue as skeptically non-committal. Certainly none of them have spoken in favor of Turkish membership. (Le Pen, of course, doesn't just want to keep out the Turks--he would like to deport Muslim "immigrant" citizens of France who are already there.) This consensus is a troubling sign for the future.

--Jeff Weintraub

[Update: In the end, according to early official counts reported the Guardian, Sarkozy and Royale finished well ahead of the rest of the pack: "Sarko v Ségo in French poll: France sets up battle of left and right". Sarkozy got an estimated 30.5% of the votes, the best first-round showing for a right-wing Presidential candidate in 30 years. Royal took an estimated 25.7%, "the highest for a Socialist since Francois Mitterrand in 1988." Bayrou received about 19% and Le Pen about 11%. As the BBC report notes, "disillusionment with politicians and their promises did not translate into apathy." The overall turnout was 85%--apparently the highest figure since 1965, and one that we can barely imagine here in the US. The second and final round of the Presidential election will be on Sunday, May 6.]

Charles Bremneris Paris Correspondent for The Times and has previously reported from New York and Brussels.

Here they are for the last time. From Sunday evening only two of these 12 faces will be left in the French presidential race. The final batch of polls today all suggest that the two-week run-off will be the long-expected left-right duel between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy.

But the undecided vote remains extraordinarily high at about 30 percent. Of course François Bayrou, the centrist, and Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far right have been proclaiming their certainty that they will make it into the final. Bayrou, at least, is still in with a chance.

In Nice last night, Le Pen predicted a "tsunami" of support on Sunday (my moment with Le Pen in today's paper). Bayrou, down in his Pyrenean home, spent the day fulminating over an editorial in Le Monde which decreed that Royal must reach the run-off because the exclusion of the Socialists would somehow be a denial of democracy. The editorial, by Jean-Marie Colombani, the longserving boss of France's most august newspaper, gave Bayrou an opportunity once again to pose as a humble musketeer fighting "the good old connivence among the political, financial and media establishment."

Royal roused her followers in Toulouse, but more interesting to report was her unexpected tribute to Tony Blair on France-Inter radio this morning.

Readers here may remember that Royal has tried to rid herself of the taint of blairisme from which she suffered after praising the British Prime Minister early last year. When France-Inter taunted her over Blair this morning, I expected her to perform her usual evasion, instead, she bravely said the following:

"There was a taboo. The Socialists were not supposed to mention Tony Blair. My concern is to look at what works and see how we can apply solutions to France. Tony Blair invested massively in public services, in health care, schools and the battle against youth unemployment. He succeeded in meeting the challenge."

Ségo also tackled another item that has landed her in hot water -- the way that she has used her sex as a campaign argument, saying "vote for me because I'm a woman". While the argument seems to work with women voters, according to polls, she has been attacked by leading feminists who do not like what they see as politically incorrect logic. "It's the wrong strategy, totally counterproductive, Michèle Fitoussi, a heavyweight commentator told The New York Times. "Women are going to vote for Ségolène because they believe she's most qualified to be president, not because she's a woman. It's an insult to our intelligence to ask us to do such a thing."

Sylviane Agacinski, a philospher who is the wife of Lionel Jospin, the last Socialist Prime Minister, denounced the Royal argument in Le Monde this week. "I do not agree with a feminism that sees itself as a sort of reverse male chauvinism," said Agacinski. "Making femininity a decisive campaign argument is surely making gender play an exorbitant and illegitimate role."

Royal's answer to this today was: "France needs a head of state who sees things differently and who has understood that everything is connected. I don't know if this global approach is feminine but in any event, I take responsibility for my femininity... It is perhaps this which helps me understand this holistic approach."

Sarkozy does not use his virility as an argument but the message is clear from his pugnacious language and gestures. The second round, assuming we have a Ségo-Sarko duel, will be about the masculine versus the feminine, Napoléon Bonaparte versus Joan of Arc. In case anyone missed the point, Sarko chose an extraordinary venue for his final campaign appearance yesterday -- a visit to a bull farm. Dressed like a cowboy, he rode around a farm that breeds fighting bulls in the Camargue.

Cécilia Sarkozy is still absent (last post). Libération today ran a column pointing up the pusillanimity of the French media. In a US campaign, if the candidate's wife went AWOL, he would face immediate questions, but in France there is silence, said Daniel Schneiderman, Libération's media columnist. Sarkozy gave an oblique answer when asked vaguely about his private life in Le Parisien today: "My family has suffered a lot from certain controversies," he said.

This campaign has been full of paradoxes. The French, who were said to be alienated by politics, have taken more interest than in any presidential race for decades, as shown by opinion polls and ratings for television political broadcasts. Yet, according to an Opinionway poll today 59 percent of the public thinks that the campaign has been "of poor quality". The highest marks for effective campaigning went to Bayrou with a 74 percent favourable rating then Sarkozy at 63 percent and Le Pen at 43 percent. The disappointment over Royal was reflected in the 63 percent who think that she has run a poor campaign.

There are two more weeks of this to go for Sunday's top pair. We should have reliable exit polls by about 18.30 Paris time on Sunday.

Here are final TNS Sofres and CSA opinion poll graphs since last November. The top four are Sarkozy, Royal, Bayrou and Le Pen.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Republicans headed for electoral catastrophe?

Whenever one mentions public opinion polls, one should start by emphasizing that their results are usually open to multiple interpretations and, even when they look unambiguous, they should still be taken with a grain of salt. Having said that, I must confess that I find two recent reports from the well-regarded political pollster Scott Rasmussen extremely intriguing.

Forty-five percent (45%) of American voters say they would currently vote for the Democrat in their district while 35% would pull the voting lever for a Republican. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found 6% favoring a third-party option while 15% are not sure.

Democrats lead by five percentage points among men, by fourteen points among women.

Of course, overall national figures won't map directly onto specific House districts or Senate races. And these potential voters still have a year and a half to change their minds. Still, the fact that the Democrats are leading among men as well as women suggests a fairly pervasive disenchantment with Republicans right now.

The next sentence is the most striking:

Nancy Pelosi’s party holds a staggering 30-percentage point lead among voters under 30.

Unfortunately, younger voters are generally less likely to vote than older ones. But if the next generation of voters continues to feel this way, and if they actually manage to get to the polls in any significant numbers, then the Republicans can expect minority status for the foreseeable future.

That link takes us to a previous report (dated April 3, 2007) with more bad news for the Republicans:

During the month of March, 37.2% of American adults considered themselves to be Democrats while just 31.5% considered themselves Republicans. Those numbers are little changed from last month, but confirm a significant movement away from identification the Republican Party. March was the sixth consecutive month (and seventh month out of eight) that the Democrats have enjoyed a net advantage of at least five points (see history). Prior to this recent stretch, the Democrats had never enjoyed a five-point advantage in the data released by Rasmussen Reports (a period of 31-months).

On the other hand, it's worth adding that so far these results mean bad news for the Republicans more than good news for the Democrats.

Another significant note is that 31.3% of Americans now refuse to identify with either major party. That’s a seven percentage point increase since Election 2004 and the highest total of unaffiliateds ever measured. Most of the growth in unaffiliateds has come from the GOP. The number of Democrats in the adult population has remained more stable over the past 3 years.

It seems safe to conclude that many voters are pretty disillusioned with both parties, but more disgusted with the Republicans. Hard to blame them. This is good news for the Democrats--if they don't blow it.

The larger problem, though, is that our whole political system is in pretty unhealthy shape, and to make matters worse, since 2000 an enormous amount of additional damage has accumulated that will have to be repaired. If there is a Republican crash, which would certainly be well deserved, will that open up possibilities for real improvement? Let's hope so.

Baghdad seen through the eyes of its garbagemen

Mick Hartley, my source for this item, rightly draws attention to a proud claim by one of the Baghdad garbage collectors interviewed for the article below:

"Despite everything, we are the only service that has never stopped working from the fall of Baghdad until today," says Nuri with pride.

I have no idea whether or not this assertion is accurate. But this story offers one illuminating perspective on life in Baghdad since 2003. Some highlights:

Garbage collector Saad Kamal Farhud is always scared, dodging bombs and bullets to shift the filth of Baghdad for a pittance. Yet he says that things have improved since thousands of troops launched a crackdown.

"I'm frightened every day," says the 30-year-old driver who begins his daily round of the bins on the west bank of the Tigris River, picking his way through homemade but lethal booby traps and bursts of gunfire.

"No one taught me how to spot the roadside bombs but I've learned to pick out the trip wires that set them off," confides the married father-of-two, already lucky enough to have escaped one explosion. [....]

"Homemade bombs are often hidden under the bins or rubbish. So the insurgents don't want us to clean up and they shoot at our workers," explains 43-year-old Mohammed Nuri, an employee of Baghdad Municipality, who heads the rubbish collection in the district.

Another explanation left unsaid, however, is that at least many of Baghdad's municipal dustmen, like Farhud, are Shiites and some of the districts that they steer their dumpster trucks through are predominantly Sunni. [....]

"About half the equipment was looted after the fall of Baghdad. Things are difficult. Our trucks are old and there aren't enough," says Karim. [....]

Once the rubbish has been scooped up, the trucks head out to one of two main dumps outside Baghdad - Taji, 30 kilometers (almost 20 miles) to the north, and Husseniyah, 15 kilometers to the northeast.

"The road frightens us. When the situation is really too dangerous, there are temporary dumps where we dump the rubbish. But these days, with the security plan I have to say things have got a lot better," says Farhud. "We hope things will continue that way."

BAGHDAD -- Garbage collector Saad Kamal Farhud is always scared, dodging bombs and bullets to shift the filth of Baghdad for a pittance. Yet he says that things have improved since thousands of troops launched a crackdown.

"I'm frightened every day," says the 30-year-old driver who begins his daily round of the bins on the west bank of the Tigris River, picking his way through homemade but lethal booby traps and bursts of gunfire.

"No one taught me how to spot the roadside bombs but I've learned to pick out the trip wires that set them off," confides the married father-of-two, already lucky enough to have escaped one explosion.

Farhud says that he has been fired on several times in Allawi, a neighborhood in the Karkh district in the heart of the battle-scared Iraqi capital where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in the past four years.

"I used to live there ... I'm scared every time I go there. The people are weird. Some of them have come up and said: 'Don't come to collect the rubbish any more.' They don't want their district to be clean," he says.

"Homemade bombs are often hidden under the bins or rubbish. So the insurgents don't want us to clean up and they shoot at our workers," explains 43-year-old Mohammed Nuri, an employee of Baghdad Municipality, who heads the rubbish collection in the district.

Another explanation left unsaid, however, is that at least many of Baghdad's municipal dustmen, like Farhud, are Shiites and some of the districts that they steer their dumpster trucks through are predominantly Sunni.

It was sectarian warfare and militias cleansing neighborhoods into homogenous Shiite and Sunni zones that forced the United States to change strategy and divert tens and thousands of Iraqi and American troops to Baghdad.

But two months later, dustmen say that they no longer venture into some areas, such as the southern Sunni insurgent bastion of Saidiyah.

In violent Sunni areas such as Jamiaa, Ameriyah, Ghazaliyah, and Hadel, residents pay people from their own pocket to clean up the streets and sweep the litter, refuse workers claim.

Some dustmen's vans are accompanied by gunmen carrying Kalashnikov rifles. The municipal refuse collection headquarters is guarded by armed police.

"Five of our workers have died," says Talal Karim, who is responsible for trucks and equipment used by a team of around 400 people. "Recently one worker was killed by a mortar round while he was working."

"One of my colleagues was shot with four bullets six months ago," says Farhud.

"Despite everything, we are the only service that has never stopped working from the fall of Baghdad until today," says Nuri with pride.

Once the rubbish has been scooped up, the trucks head out to one of two main dumps outside Baghdad - Taji, 30 kilometers (almost 20 miles) to the north, and Husseniyah, 15 kilometers to the northeast.

"The road frightens us. When the situation is really too dangerous, there are temporary dumps where we dump the rubbish. But these days, with the security plan I have to say things have got a lot better," says Farhud. "We hope things will continue that way."

Iraqi and US military officials say that execution-style killings have fallen in Baghdad since the crackdown was launched February 14.

US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell said that such killings were down 60 percent between "the last week of March and first [week of] April", compared to a similar period of the month before.

Iraqi Brigadier General Qassim Atta Mussawi has said that an average of eight bodies are found on a daily basis compared to the dozens of handcuffed and blindfolded corpses of men riddled with bullets found everyday on Baghdad's streets before the crackdown.

But there is little prospect of improvement on the financial front. Farhud, who has three hungry mouths to feed, earns 168,000 Iraqi dinars ($130) a month for working from 7.00 am until 2.00 pm six days a week.

"That doesn't give me much to live on. Sometimes I need to pay 4,000 dinars to get to work," because he lives in Shuala in northern Baghdad.

Working conditions are poor. There are no showers for the workers and the equipment is outdated.

"About half the equipment was looted after the fall of Baghdad. Things are difficult. Our trucks are old and there aren't enough," says Karim.

Overflowing rubbish dumps littered across wasteland, raw sewage, and people setting fire to trash have become common sights in Baghdad.

Why targeting Beijing's "Genocide Olympics" can help Darfur

International embarrassment can sometimes be an effective form of political and diplomatic pressure. It appears that some Hollywood celebrities--one of whom, Mia Farrow, also happens to be a long-time activist on behalf of the victims of the Darfur atrocity--may have found a weak spot in the Chinese government's usual indifference to criticisms of its support for genocidal mass murder in Darfur.

I don't want to make too much of this one incident, though even in its own terms it's worth noticing simply because it's a positive development in a context where these are very rare. But it may well point to some larger practical implications.

the genocidal regime in Khartoum is vulnerable to political, diplomatic, and economic pressure through its foreign backers, supporters, and protectors (see Targeted economic pressure on Khartoum CAN help Darfur). In this respect, the most important single actor is China, which has a massive involvement in Sudan's oil industry and provides crucial diplomatic cover for the Sudanese government in the UN Security Council and elsewhere.

China's oil companies trade on western stock markets, which makes them suitable targets for carefully focused divestment strategies and other activist campaigns to raise public awareness of the key role they play in enabling the Darfur atrocity. And, more generally, the Chinese government should be made to suffer increased political and diplomatic embarrassment unless it moderates its support for the génocidaires in Khartoum.

For example, the upcoming 2008 Olympics in Beijing will draw increasing world attention to China, and they're clearly very important to the Chinese regime from a public-relations point of view, so this may make the government especially sensitive about having China's public image linked to mass murder in Africa. People concerned about stopping this ongong mass murder should try to use every possible bit of political leverage this might afford.

An activist campaign to target China through its "Genocide Olympics" has been coming together. I recommend reading an important appeal by Eric Reeves, "On China and the 2008 Olympic Games" (and for further information, see HERE.)

To avoid any possible misunderstanding, for most of these activists the idea is not to urge a boycott of the 2008 Olympics, an effort that would almost certainly fail. Instead, the point is to use the spotlight provided by the Olympics to put China on trial in the arena of international public opinion for its complicity with genocidal mass murder in Darfur.

=> Remarkably enough, there are already signs that this activist campaign might be having some effect on the Chinese government. As the New York Times (see below) reported yesterday:

For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.

But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.

So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.

Ms. Farrow, a good-will ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the “Genocide Olympics” and calling on corporate sponsors and even Mr. Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to publicly exhort China to do something about Darfur. In a March 28 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, she warned Mr. Spielberg that he could “go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games,” a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.

Four days later, Mr. Spielberg [who, according to a spokesperson, previously had only a hazy sense of China's role in Sudan --JW] sent a letter to President Hu Jintao of China, condemning the killings in Darfur and asking the Chinese government to use its influence in the region “to bring an end to the human suffering there,” according to Mr. Spielberg’s spokesman, Marvin Levy.

China soon dispatched Mr. Zhai to Darfur, a turnaround that served as a classic study of how a pressure campaign, aimed to strike Beijing in a vulnerable spot at a vulnerable time, could accomplish what years of diplomacy could not.

Perhaps this will prove to be no more than a transitory public-relations stunt by the Chinese government. But even that would constitutes a bigger change in China's position on Darfur than anything we've seen in the past.

The obvious conclusion is that a broad-based campaign to target China's international reputation through the 2008 Beijing Olympics looks like a genuinely promising strategy. It could be a useful and effective addition to other activist efforts.

As the article below points out, Eric Reeves has been making this argument for months now.

On Feb. 10, in an open letter on his Web site addressed to “Darfur activists and advocates,” (translations of the letter are available in Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian, according to the Web site), a Darfur activist, Eric Reeves, promised what he called the “full-scale launch of a large, organized campaign to highlight China’s complicity in the Darfur genocide.”

“It’s time now, to begin shaming China — demanding that if the Beijing government is going to host the Summer Olympic Games of 2008, they must be responsible partners,” Mr. Reeves wrote.

WASHINGTON, April 12 — For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.

But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.

So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.

Ms. Farrow, a good-will ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the “Genocide Olympics” and calling on corporate sponsors and even Mr. Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to publicly exhort China to do something about Darfur. In a March 28 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, she warned Mr. Spielberg that he could “go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games,” a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.

Four days later, Mr. Spielberg sent a letter to President Hu Jintao of China, condemning the killings in Darfur and asking the Chinese government to use its influence in the region “to bring an end to the human suffering there,” according to Mr. Spielberg’s spokesman, Marvin Levy.

China soon dispatched Mr. Zhai to Darfur, a turnaround that served as a classic study of how a pressure campaign, aimed to strike Beijing in a vulnerable spot at a vulnerable time, could accomplish what years of diplomacy could not.

Groups focusing on many issues, including Tibet and human rights, have called for boycotts of the Games next year. But none of those issues have packed the punch of Darfur, where at least 200,000 people — some say as many as 400,000 — mostly non-Arab men, women and children, have died and 2.5 million have been displaced, as government-backed Arab militias called the janjaweed have attacked the local population.

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan has repeatedly refused American, African and European demands that he allow a United Nations peacekeeping force to supplement an underequipped and besieged African Union force of 7,000 soldiers who have been trying, with dwindling success, to restore order in the Darfur region.

“Whatever ingredient went into the decision for him to go, I’m so pleased that he went,” Ms. Farrow said in a phone interview about Mr. Zhai’s trip. She called the response from Beijing “extraordinary.”

In describing Mr. Spielberg’s decision to write to the Chinese leader, the filmmaker’s spokesman said that while Mr. Spielberg “certainly has been aware of the situation in Darfur” it was “only recently that he became aware of China’s involvement there.”

During a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Zhai called activists who want to boycott the Games “either ignorant or ill natured.” But he added, “We suggest the Sudan side show flexibility and accept” the United Nations peacekeepers.

During closed-door diplomatic meetings, Chinese officials have said they do not want any of their Darfur overtures linked to the Olympics, American and European officials said.

In an e-mail message on Thursday, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington warned anew against such a linkage. “If someone wants to pin Olympic Games and Darfur issue together to raise his/her fame, he/she is playing a futile trick,” the spokesman, Chu Maoming, wrote.

National pride in China has been surging over the coming Olympics, with a gigantic clock in Tiananmen Square counting down the minutes to the Games, and Olympic souvenir stores sprouting all over with the “One World, One Dream” Beijing Olympics motto.

In public, Bush administration officials have been relatively restrained in welcoming China’s new diplomatic zeal.

“We have indications at this point that the Chinese are now taking even a more aggressive role than they have in the past,” Andrew S. Natsios, the Bush administration’s special envoy to Sudan, told a Senate panel on Wednesday. “I think they may be the crucial actors.”

J. Stephen Morrison, a Sudan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he had been warning Chinese officials that Darfur and the Olympics could collide, to no avail.

“I’ve been talking to them and telling them this is coming, this is coming,” Mr. Morrison said. “I told them, there’s an infrastructure out there, they need to feed the beast, and you’re in their sight.” Before, he said, “they kind of shrugged.”

But there is growing concern inside China that Darfur is hurting Beijing’s image.

“Their equity is to be seen as an ethical, rising global power — that’s their goal,” Mr. Morrison said. “Their goal is not to get in bed with every sleazy government that comes up with a little oil.”

It remains unclear if the Hollywood campaign will work — China has not agreed to sanctions yet. But there is also plenty of time between now and the opening ceremony of the Olympics Games in Beijing next year, and more plans are afoot in the activist camp.

On Feb. 10, in an open letter on his Web site addressed to “Darfur activists and advocates,” (translations of the letter are available in Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian, according to the Web site), a Darfur activist, Eric Reeves, promised what he called the “full-scale launch of a large, organized campaign to highlight China’s complicity in the Darfur genocide.”

“It’s time now, to begin shaming China — demanding that if the Beijing government is going to host the Summer Olympic Games of 2008, they must be responsible partners,” Mr. Reeves wrote.

One possibility that activists are weighing: trying to get Olympic athletes to carry a replica of the Olympic torch from Darfur to the Chinese border.

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)